Pakistan Diplomacy: About six months before cricketer-turned politician Imran Khan lost power, Pakistan slipped into diplomatic exile. For almost three years after that, the country’s leadership remained cut off from major Western capitals. In global politics, it seemed as if Islamabad had simply vanished.
But over the past 10 months, under the command of Field Marshal Asim Munir and a compliant civilian setup, the country has apparently tried to claw its way back. The approach has been subtle – praising US President Donald Trump, warming ties with Saudi Arabia and reopening old trade doors in the West.
Last week, Pakistan’s Commerce Minister Jam Kamal Khan met a European Union (EU) delegation in Brussels. Both sides agreed to strengthen their partnership under the EU’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+). The programme has brought Pakistan nearly $8 billion a year since 2014.
Islamabad has also reached out to Ottawa (Canada) and other Western capitals, seeking to revive trade momentum that had frozen for years.
In Washington, signs of a thaw are visible. Trump has repeatedly spoken highly of Munir. He has described Pakistan as a “peace-making nation” and claimed he helped defuse tensions between India and Pakistan, avoiding what he called a nuclear scare.
A new “package deal” between the two countries is now taking shape, one that includes US access to certain military bases, cooperation on cryptocurrency monitoring, critical mineral exploration and investment in Pakistan’s offshore oil fields.
For Pakistan’s military, the deal offers a political facelift. It could be a lifeline for its struggling economy. Recently, Islamabad handed 23 offshore oil blocks to four international consortiums, one of which includes a Turkish company. But experts say the prospects of extracting oil from these deep-sea fields remain uncertain.
Since independence in 1947, Pakistan has drilled only 18 wells across its 300,000 square kilometres of coastal zone near Oman, the UAE and Iran.
At the same time, Pakistan has been courting Riyadh with unusual energy. During Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s recent visit to the kingdom, both countries announced a new Economic Cooperation Framework. The plan includes joint projects in energy, mining, agriculture, information technology, tourism and food security.
A defense pact signed in September declared that an attack on one country would be treated as an attack on both, a clause that analysts see as Pakistan’s attempt to rebrand itself as a reliable Islamic-world partner and attract Saudi investments to stabilise its battered economy.
Behind the charm offensive, though, lies a sense of urgency. Analysts believe Pakistan’s diplomacy under Munir is reactive, not strategic. Deals appear rushed, driven by optics rather than vision. The military seeks to regain public approval by projecting Pakistan as standing firm against India. Islamabad has even hinted at sending troops to Gaza, a move meant to signal solidarity with the Muslim world.
Experts say this flurry of diplomatic gestures reflects Pakistan’s domestic instability. They see Munir’s global outreach as an attempt to legitimise military rule under the guise of peace-building.
In reality, they say, the world still views Islamabad not as a dependable partner but as an opportunistic state searching for relevance.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: ZEE News
